1. Susan B. Glasser: Welcome to Trump’s 2020 Campaign

His SOTU speech made clear that he intends to run his reelection race the same way he ran his first campaign: as a divider, not a uniter. Trump is all about having enemies. Without Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to set himself in opposition to, he will try to vilify far-left socialist Democrats and rampaging illegal immigrants in 2020. The immigrant-bashing, of course, was a staple and centerpiece of his 2016 race. The claim that Democrats are going to turn America into a Venezuelan socialist hellscape is something new. The Party, with its embrace of Sanders (and his Medicare-for-all proposal) and A.O.C. (with her talk of seventy-per-cent income-tax rates on the über-rich), appears to be tilting left at just the right moment for Trump. “It seems to me that DJT has zero interest in expanding his coalition, and is going all-in on making the Democratic alternative unpalatable, hence the focus on opposing ‘socialism,’ ” the Republican strategist Michael Steel, a former senior adviser to the House G.O.P. leadership, told me in an e-mail the morning after the speech.

Democrats, of course, will seek to make the race a referendum on the contentious President himself—on his corruption and controversies, erratic persona, hard-line policies, and bullying tweets. If they succeed in doing so, they will likely win. Trump starts out, at this point in his term, with the lowest ratings of any President in decades, and already public surveys have found a significant majority of registered voters who say they will definitely vote against him next year. Then again, a crowded field of more than a dozen Democrats now seems certain, with no clear front-runner. Polls of the primary electorate are skewing increasingly liberal, and there is a decided tilt left in who is choosing to run and who is opting out. “The President is unlikely to ever get his approval ratings much above where they are now. At best, he hits forty-five per cent,” the political analyst Amy Walter, the national editor of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, told me. “The way Trump wins reëlection isn’t by getting more people to like him—it’s by insuring that voters don’t see the Democratic nominee as a viable alternative.” https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/trump-vows-to-stop-america-from-turning-into-a-venezuelan-socialist-hellscape

2. Ronald Brownstein: Trump Is Walling Off the GOP

The most misleading line in Donald Trump’s State of the Union address this week might have also been the most revealing about how he is reconfiguring the Republican Party and reshaping America’s electoral alignment.

“Legal immigrants enrich our nation and strengthen our society in countless ways,” he declared at one point. “I want people to come into our country, in the largest numbers ever, but they have to come in legally.”

Trump ad-libbed the part about “the largest numbers ever,” but even the base claim—that he supports legal immigration—radically rewrites his record. Trump just last year supported legislation from Republican Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa that would have cut legal immigration by more than 40 percent—the largest reduction since the 1920s, according to a study from the libertarian Cato Institute. If that bill had been put in place in 1965, when Congress revised the nation’s immigration laws, it would have blocked nearly three-fifths of all the immigrants the nation has admitted since then, the study’s author, David Bier, calculated.

All of this underscores how Trump, across a broad range of immigration issues, is steering the GOP toward the preferences of a distinct minority of Americans. And yet the evidence is also clear that Trump is systematically eradicating opposition to his agenda inside the GOP. Over four-fifths of Republicans in the House and nearly three-fourths of Republicans in the Senate voted for the massive cuts to legal immigration that Trump supported last year, though the bills ultimately failed. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/02/trumps-alienating-immigration-agenda/582265/

3. Reihan Salam: Trump’s revealing immigration ad lib

Though Grassley’s bill failed last year in the Republican-controlled Senate, and a companion measure died in the GOP House, Trump has used, in the meantime, almost every administrative tool at his disposal to create more hurdles for legal immigrants. “The idea that the administration is trying to increase legal immigration, or allow more of it, is just totally contrary to every proposal that they have put out here,” Bier said in an interview. Trump was so determined to restrict legal immigration, he rejected a deal accepted by virtually every Senate Democrat that would have provided him with $25 billion for his border wall in return for a pathway to citizenship for the so-called Dreamers, the young people brought illegally to the U.S. by their parents.

Trump’s hostility to legal immigration, which he so aggressively sought to hide in his speech, is key to understanding the real implications of his immigration agenda. Once again on Tuesday, Trump signaled that he prioritizes no cause more than building a wall across the southern border, portraying his determination as a sign of his commitment to ensuring Americans’ security and upholding the rule of law. His praise for legal immigration, though distorting his record, provided a critical buttress for that case: It allowed him to suggest that his motivation for the wall isn’t resisting immigration per se, only illegal and dangerous behavior. The truth, though, is that the wall is itself only one brick in a much larger structure aimed at restricting most kinds of immigration. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/02/trumps-alienating-immigration-agenda/582265/

4. Jonathan Chait: New Proof the Trump Tax Cuts Are Doing the Exact Opposite of What They Promised

The Trump tax cuts had several publicly stated goals. First, by lowering corporate tax rates, they would induce companies to bring home massive stores of overseas cash. “We’ve got about $3 trillion in trapped cash overseas that basically can’t come back in this country because of our tax laws,” said Paul Ryan. Second, by eliminating loopholes and preferences, it would reduce the need for and value of gaming the tax code through specialized knowledge. “We just want to clean it up,” explained Ryan, “we just want to simplify the whole thing.” And third, by promoting new investment and economic activity, the tax cuts would spur enough new growth to replace the lost revenue.

The law’s putative goals have proven a failure. Tax revenues aren’t holding steady, corporate cash isn’t coming back from overseas, and the tax code is more complex and expensive to comply with than ever. So why aren’t Republicans thinking about repealing or at least revising the bill that has failed to accomplish its goals? Because it’s still doing a great job of accomplishing the actual goal that they really cared about: letting people who own businesses have more money. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/02/trump-tax-cuts-doing-opposite-of-promised-corporate-cash-accountants.html

5. Jonathan Chait: An Inheritance Tax Is Democrats’ Best Weapon Against Trump’s Oligarchy

There is no issue in American politics that splits the parties more cleanly than the taxation of large inherited fortunes. Last year’s Republican tax cut included a big cut in the estate tax, which will now allow couples to pass on $22 million to their heirs before the first dollar of tax kicks in. Not satisfied with this generous gift, Republican senators recently unveiled a bill to eliminate the estate tax altogether, thus relieving heirs to fortunes exceeding the $22 million threshold of any tax burden.

Centering an attack on inherited wealth also gives Democrats a chance to highlight the still barely known reality of Trump’s sad history in business. Trump is known to the country as a self-made man, whose crude mannerisms suggest some working-class background. In reality, we now know he was primarily in the business of laundering inherited money. Last fall, a trio of University of Maryland political scientists found not only that most voters do not realize that Trump was born into great wealth, but also that learning that he was changes their overall view of him for the worse.

Trump — the real Trump, not the character he played on television — is the embodiment of inherited privilege. He has surrounded himself with crooks and cronies who live by his own values, in which money begets political power, which begets more money, on and on in perpetuity. It is a rare opportunity for a political party to face a politician who embodies the social phenomenon they are trying to fight. A tax on inherited fortunes is a symbolic and substantive blow against the crisis of American oligarchy that Trump simultaneously aggravated and embodies. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/02/inheritance-tax-estate-democrats-trump-oligarchy.html

6.  Eric Lutz: Trump Explodes As Democrats Close In On His Business

Donald Trump on Thursday whined again that Democrats are engaging in unprecedented “presidential harassment,” his term for the congressional scrutiny the new House majority is beginning to intensify. “The Dems and their committees are going ‘nuts,’” he wrote in one tweet of a three-part rant Thursday morning. “The Republicans never did this to President Obama.”

It’s a particularly rich complaint coming from the guy who spent years falsely claiming Barack Obama was not born in the United States, but it reflects Trump’s growing unease as Democrats revive and launch new probes into his administration and his business empire. Trump has taken out his angst on House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff in particular, as Schiff and other Democrats on the panel prepare to launch a broad inquiry into the president’s family business. “After having found zero Russian Collusion,” Trump tweeted Thursday, “he is going to be looking at every aspect of my life, both financial and personal, even though there is no reason to be doing so.”

As the noose tightens, Trump—who has so far enjoyed the protection of a Republican-controlled Congress—is in revolt. “If there is going to be peace and legislation, there cannot be war and investigation,” he declared during his State of the Union Address on Tuesday, a line that received scant applause. “I thought it was, frankly, kind of bizarre,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told NBC of Trump’s ostensible threat. “I don’t think that investigations into federal misconduct have anything to do with our economy.” Schiff echoed her comments on Wednesday, telling reporters, “I can understand why the idea of meaningful oversight terrifies the president. Several of his close associates are going to jail, others await trial, and criminal investigations continue. We’re going to do our job and won’t be distracted or intimidated by threats or attacks.” https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/02/trump-explodes-as-democrats-close-in-on-his-business-schiff

7.  Emily Jane Fox: “I Am Disgusted”: Behind The Scenes Of Trump’s Increasingly Scrutinized $107 Million Inauguration

Stephanie Winston Wolkoff was the mastermind event producer behind Trump’s inaugural celebration, which has since come under S.D.N.Y. investigation. Now, taped conversations reveal Wolkoff’s concerns with how money was being spent, the general chaos of the process, the involvement of the Trump family, and the people in charge, namely Rick Gates and Tom Barrack.

Last February, The New York Times published an article centered on WIS, headlined “Trump’s Inaugural Committee Paid $26 million to Firm of First Lady’s Adviser.” The inaugural committee had raised a stunning $107 million—about twice what Barack Obama had hauled in 2009—from donors such as Sheldon Adelson and corporations like AT&T. But as the Times reported, the tax form revealed profligate spending—nearly $10 million on travel; $4.6 million on salaries and benefits; and $100,000 to Rick Gates, the former campaign aide and deputy chairman of the inauguration who, about a week later, became one of Robert Mueller’s first major cooperating witnesses. Some $40 million was publicly unaccounted for. Wolkoff, as the event planner in charge, became the face of the disarray. The Times story quoted an official from a government watchdog group accusing her of “fiscal mismanagement at its worst.” https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/02/behind-the-scenes-of-trumps-107-million-inauguration

8. Amanda Ripley: Trump Is a Mental Health Story

So far, most of the mainstream stories about Trump’s narcissism have been about whether mental health professionals should diagnose him from afar. That’s a worthy debate. But journalists are not psychiatrists. We are not bound by the rules of the American Psychiatric Association. We are bound by a duty to inform the public, without fear, drawing upon any source that may prove useful.Narcissists, for example, need admiration the way addicts need substances. They believe they are truly special and yet not appreciated for their gifts, which can lead them to act entitled, as if the rules do not apply to them. In their quest for recognition, they sometimes exploit others, contradict what they’ve said, and break their promises — all the while arguing (and often truly believing) in their new, alternative facts. Once we know this, Trump’s tendency to revise history becomes unsurprising and explicable.

It’s a painful way to live, because no amount of adoration will ever be enough. After every victory, feelings of envy, anger, and frustration squirm back to the surface. Now, Behary says, Trump is “unraveling.” This, too, is predictable, which is why we need to talk about it, out in the open. As the bad news stacks up for Trump, including Republican losses in the midterms, a divided Congress, and continuing legal investigations, he is likely experiencing profound mental agony.

In this agitated state, narcissists are notoriously bad at negotiating, as it turns out. (They are good at bullying, which is not the same thing.) Catherine Conner, a family law attorney and mediator in Northern California, understands this better than political scientists, because she has helped hundreds of people craft child custody agreements and divorce settlements. A crisis, such as a divorce, may intensify narcissistic tendencies and make negotiation impossible, she says.

“The only way to create an agreement is to put yourself in the other person’s shoes and come up with a package that might appeal to both of you,” Conner says. “If they are incapable of seeing the world through anyone else’s eyes, they won’t be able to do this. They will just remain stuck on their vision of what should be, convinced that everyone will see it their way.”

This would explain why Trump was reportedly shocked that the Democrats did not agree to his border-wall terms. He was unable to see the situation from their point of view. When this kind of intransigence takes hold in Conner’s cases, the parties are sometimes forced to rely on judges to make the decision.
In Trump’s case, if he is unable to compromise before the government shuts down again in two weeks, the courts might have to get involved. Or Trump might just turn the government back on in order to be the hero. “Narcissists are so good at showing up as Messiahs,” Behary says. If he’s at risk of losing the support of his fan base, which he needs in order to stop the pain, he will swoop in to save the day. Because that’s what narcissists do. https://medium.com/s/reasonable-doubt/trump-is-a-mental-health-story-652c340f4503

9. Gabriel Sherman: “Trump Is Hated By Everyone Inside The White House”: The State Of The Union Left Trump Stoked—But Some Of His Staff Are Miserable

Morale inside the White House, never high to begin with, has turned particularly bleak, according to interviews with 10 former West Wing officials and Republicans close to the president. The issue is that many see Trump himself as the problem. “Trump is hated by everyone inside the White House,” a former West Wing official told me. His shambolic management style, paranoia, and pattern of blaming staff for problems of his own making have left senior White House officials burned out and resentful, sources said. “It’s total misery. People feel trapped,” a former official said. “Trump always needs someone to blame,” a second former official said. Sources said the leak of Trump’s private schedules to Axios—which revealed how little work Trump actually does—was a signal of how disaffected his staff has become.

What’s driving a lot of the frustration is that Trump, now more than ever, runs the West Wing as a family business. Four sources said the only White House advisers he truly consults are daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner. “This is a family affair, and if you’re not in the family, you’ve got problems,” a former official said. The special privileges and access afforded to Kushner and Ivanka have been alienating Trump’s acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney. “Mick is not entirely thrilled with the family,” a Republican close to Mulvaney told me. Multiple sources said Mulvaney is looking for a way out of the West Wing. He’s said to be interested in a Cabinet position, either at the Commerce Department or Treasury, and he’s reportedly been pursuing the University of South Carolina presidency. A senior White House official recently lobbied a friend of Mulvaney’s to convince Mulvaney to stay. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/02/the-state-of-the-union-left-trump-stoked-but-some-of-his-staff-are-miserable

10.  David Wallace-Wells: The Green New Deal Isn’t Enough. But Democrats Should Embrace It Anyway.

The science says that what is necessary to avert catastrophic climate change is truly jaw-dropping: halving emissions by 2030 and completely zeroing out on carbon by 2050, a project that the U.N. says (in language the Green New Deal embraces) would require a mobilization like the one during World War II. But when what is necessary does not seem plausible, where does that leave politics? As my other colleague Eric Levitz suggests,<http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/02/ocasio-cortez-aoc-green-new-deal-resolution-explained-utopian-and-pragmatic.html> it leaves us with a choice, between accepting the politics of the possible or trying to forge a new politics. That sounds grand, and possibly self-serving for the left wing of the party. But it’s actually a lesson the party as a whole has been learning already — Medicare for All, free, abolishing ICE. None of these propositions, should they become law, are likely to match their banner rhetoric to a T. But in the aftermath of Obamacare — and its post-passage struggles — the party has seemed to recognize that selling hard with hyperbole and backfilling with policy was okay. In fact, it’s the course of politics. And if hyperbole is okay for health care and higher education and immigration, why shouldn’t it be for climate change? After all, when it comes to climate change, hyperbole isn’t even hyperbole; the science itself is hysterical. Politics is just beginning to catch up.

How feasible is climate action on this scale? At the moment, unfortunately, not very — though it is pretty incredible just how quickly a legislative project of this ambition has acquired the momentum of this: 60 House members and nine senators co-sponsoring, including at least three major Democratic presidential candidates. But as The New Yorker’s Osita Nwanevu points out, while the bill’s lead author in the Senate, Ed Markey, insists he hopes it can pass through the threat of a filibuster with Republican votes, anyone who is even passingly familiar with today’s Republican Party knows that isn’t happening any time soon. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/02/democrats-should-embrace-flawed-ambitious-green-new-deal.html

11. Maureen Dowd: Daddy Warbucks Goes to War

Pecker is up to his slimy neck in politically motivated messes. He had to make a deal with prosecutors after he helped deliver his pal Donald Trump’s hush payments to the Playboy model and the porn star. The Dickensian-named head of American Media Incorporated, The Enquirer’s owner, was “apoplectic,” according to Bezos’ post in Medium, about his investigation into who leaked the texts.

“I prefer to stand up, roll this log over, and see what crawls out,” Bezos wrote.

And thus a P.R. debacle turned into a triumph. Besides unbridled consumerism, Americans love nothing more than seeing a bully like Pecker get kicked in the groin. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/09/opinion/sunday/jeff-bezos-national-enquirer-blackmail.html

12. Jeffrey Toobin: Roger Stone’s and Jerome Corsi’s Time in the Barrel

The Stone indictment reads like a political black comedy. It stars a pair of mismatched operatives, Stone and the right-wing author Jerome Corsi, who, without formal connections to the Trump campaign, went on a transatlantic quest for dirt. Mueller’s indictment does not charge Stone with any involvement in the hacking, but accuses him of lying to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence about his (and Corsi’s) efforts to pry loose the hacked e-mails from WikiLeaks. Stone is also charged with trying to coerce Randy Credico, a New York media figure and a sometime friend of Stone’s, into joining his efforts to interfere with the work of the House committee. According to the indictment, Stone, in order to prevent Credico from sharing what he knew, sent menacing e-mails to him, including one that said “Prepare to die,” followed by an expletive. He also threatened to steal Credico’s thirteen-year-old therapy dog, a Coton de Tulear named Bianca.

Corsi has not been charged, but, in December, he sued Mueller for three hundred and fifty million dollars, saying that the special counsel had engaged in prosecutorial misconduct and illegal surveillance, among other misdeeds. In this civil case, which is pending, Corsi is being represented by Larry Klayman, a Washington lawyer and eccentric best known for filing multiple lawsuits against Bill Clinton’s Administration. Also in December, Corsi published an e-book, “Silent No More: How I Became a Political Prisoner of Mueller’s ‘Witch Hunt,’ ” which recounts his experiences with Mueller’s team and what he calls being “mentally tortured by Mueller’s Deep State prosecutors.”

If Stone and Corsi had not turned up in the Mueller probe, they might have been just a pair of waning satellites in the right-wing solar system. Stone once cut a glamorous figure, with his bodybuilder’s physique and his bespoke suits from London. But, at sixty-six, he is out of shape, he hasn’t played a major role in a campaign in ages, and he scratches out a living by giving speeches, doing a little corporate consulting, and writing for fringe publishers and Web sites. (The house on the canal is rented.) Corsi is seventy-two, and spent most of his life as a marginal academic and a nomadic businessman. In middle age, he began writing books whose conceits—“Swift-boating,” “birtherism”—became shorthand for journalistic irresponsibility. Corsi, who earned a doctorate from Harvard in 1972, stamps “Ph.D.” after his name on the cover of his books as an almost poignant plea for respectability. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/02/18/roger-stones-and-jerome-corsis-time-in-the-barrel

13. Daniel Denvir: The Case Against ‘Border Security’

Democrats should follow their voters, who increasingly want more open borders, and reframe the immigration debate by rejecting the very notion that the border needs more “security” and making it clear that the real problem is the denial of migrants’ rights. The time has come for the Democratic Party to push for concrete policies to make the border more open.

There is plainly no need for more security on the border. Illegal entries to the United States (as measured by Border Patrol apprehensions, which the government has long used as a proxy) began to fall at the turn of the century, and have plummeted since 2006. They remain at historic lows today. Those who are coming to the country are often Central Americans fleeing violence that United States policy in the region helped foment.

And when it comes to drugs — a favorite justification of Mr. Trump’s for his wall — evidence shows that more “border security” does not stop trafficking. From the 1970s on, every crackdown on a drug-smuggling route, whether it was heroin via the French Connection or cocaine through the Caribbean, has only led to new innovations in the trade that have empowered murderous Mexican cartels. Some scholars even argue that the rise of fentanyl can be traced to drug interdiction.

Then why, if there isn’t truly a crisis on the border, do the Democrats continue to invoke the need for more “border security”? Largely because the conversation about the border and immigration has moved so far to the right over the past 30 years. As the linguist George Lakoff and Sam Ferguson, his student at the time, wrote more than a decade ago, the narrow framing of the “immigration” debate “has shaped its politics, defining what count as ‘problems’” and, as a result, “constrains the solutions needed to address that problem.” When the “problem” is defined as “illegal immigration,” it becomes about “the illegal act of crossing the border without papers,” and so “the logical response to the ‘wave’ of ‘illegal immigration’ becomes ‘border security.’”
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/11/opinion/democrats-border-security-wall.html

14. Jamelle Bouie Trump’s Trail of Fears

When Trump jabs at Warren with “Pocahontas,” he’s using the name as an anti-Native caricature. But when he uses Wounded Knee or the Trail of Tears in his attacks, he’s grossly trivializing this nation’s history of genocidal violence against Native Americans, as if there aren’t still millions of indigenous people living in the United States facing continued discrimination and disadvantage.

Like his attacks on prominent African-Americans or his xenophobic smears of Hispanic immigrants, the president’s jokes about these shameful moments in American history are both a performance of racial contempt and an atavistic expression of white supremacist ideology. It’s those comments — more so than his election night promise to represent “the forgotten man” — that forge whatever resemblance Trump has to Andrew Jackson.

It was Jackson who first championed reactionary white majoritarianism, Jackson who shepherded this country toward a mass democracy so tied to chattel slavery, settler colonialism and white supremacy that we still struggle to disentangle ourselves from their legacies.

Jackson, himself a frontier planter and slave owner, embodied these ideas as he carried them forward. The same is true for Trump, who similarly embodies the drive to preserve hierarchies of race, gender and national origin even as they degrade life for most Americans, including many who think they benefit from them.

All of this gives additional meaning to the president’s much-invoked slogan. He will “make America great again” by reveling in its most shameful actions and miring it in its worst impulses.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/11/opinion/trump-warren-trail-tears.html

15. Paul Krugman: Democrats, Debt and Double Standards

You don’t have to agree with everything in proposals for a “Green New Deal” to acknowledge that it’s very much an investment program, not a mere giveaway. So it has been very dismaying to see how much commentary on these proposals either demands an immediate, detailed explanation of how Democrats would pay for their ideas, or dismisses the whole thing as impractical. Was there the same pushback against Republican tax cuts? No.

Look, we’ve seen this over and over again — three times since 1980. Republicans rail against budget deficits when they’re out of power, then drop all their concerns and send the deficit soaring once they are in a position to cut taxes. Then when it’s the Democrats’ turn, they’re expected to clean up the Republicans’ red ink rather than address their own priorities. Enough already.

I’m not saying that Democrats should completely ignore the fiscal implications of their actions. Really big spending plans, especially if they don’t clearly involve investment — for example, a major expansion of federal health spending — will have to be paid for with new taxes. But if and when Democrats are in a position to make policy, they should be ambitious, and not let the deficit scolds scare them into thinking small.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/11/opinion/democrats-federal-deficit.html

16. Jonathan Chait: The Green New Deal Is a Bad Idea, Not Just a Botched Rollout

The fallout from the Green New Deal rollout last week can be felt in the form of a new round of stories explaining what went wrong. Reports in Voxand the Washington Post focus on a set of frequently asked questions prepared by the staff of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and then clumsily obfuscated, which left the policy open to ridicule and easy attack.

But the trouble with the Green New Deal wasn’t just an unvetted fact sheet. As Mike Pesca points out, very few environmental experts consider the targets laid out in the plan to be remotely attainable. Climate change experts have called for zeroing out emissions in the power sector by 2050, while the Green New Deal proposes doing so by 2030. On what basis does it maintain the time frame can be accelerated by two-thirds? It does not say. If my plan for retirement is to have a million dollars in the bank when I’m 70, and then I decide the new plan is to have a million dollars when I’m 50, is that “progress”? Or just empty sloganeering?

The plan has attracted praise from the left for its bold ambitions. That is, at best, half true. The plan contains too little prescription in areas where it’s needed, avoiding any mention of the need to expand nuclear power, increase population density in cities, and cap pollution. At the same time, it contains far too much prescription in areas where none is needed, using the Green New Deal as a platform to add in unrelated proposals for free, a job guarantee, and other ideas that motivate progressives. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/02/green-new-deal-aoc-bad-idea.html

17. Robert Reich: Trump offers socialism for the rich, capitalism for everyone else

“America will never be a socialist country,” Donald Trump declared in his State of the Union address. Someone should alert Trump that America is now a hotbed of socialism. But it is socialism for the rich. Everyone else is treated to harsh capitalism.

In the conservative mind, socialism means getting something for doing nothing. That pretty much describes the $21bn saved by the nation’s largest banks last year thanks to Trump’s tax cuts, some of which went into massive bonuses for bank executives. On the other hand, more than 4,000 lower-level bank employees got a big dose of harsh capitalism. They lost their jobs.

Banks that are too big to fail – courtesy of the 2008 bank bailout – enjoy a hidden subsidy of some $83bn a year, because creditors facing less risk accept lower interest on deposits and loans. Last year, Wall Street’s bonus pool was $31.4bn. Take away the hidden subsidy and the bonus pool disappears.

Under socialism for the rich, you can screw up big time and still reap big rewards

Trump and his appointees at the Federal Reserve are easing bank requirements put in place after the bailout. They’ll make sure the biggest banks remain too big to fail.

Trump is promoting socialism for the rich and harsh capitalism for everyone else in other ways. GM has got more than $600m in federal contracts, plus $500m in tax breaks. Some of this has gone into the pockets of GM executives. Chairman and CEO Mary Barra raked in almost $22m in total compensation in 2017 alone.
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But GM employees are subject to harsh capitalism. GM is planning to lay off more than 14,000 workers and close three assembly plants and two component factories in North America by the end of 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/feb/11/trump-offers-socialism-for-the-rich-capitalism-for-everyone-else

18. Bess Levin: Don Jr. Tells Conservatives To Fight Their “Loser” Teachers

Republicans have never been big fans of education, or, as they like to describe it, elitist sources of liberal, possibly Satanic ideology that allow our children’s brains to become infected with book learning and facts. Rick Santorum famously called Barack Obama a “snob” for wanting “everybody in America to go to college.” Last year, in the run-up to the midterms, the chairman of the Pennsylvania Republican Party reportedly accused a high-school teacher of using his position for “liberal indoctrination,” because the guy handed out voter-registration forms. Chris Christie and Scott Walker regularly demonized teachers’ unions, punishing them with draconian budget cuts. Donald Trump appointed a woman who hates schools to run the Department of Education. So it probably shouldn’t come as a surprise that the president’s eldest child and namesake, Donald Trump Jr., holds a similar view, which he shared last night at daddy’s rally in El Paso. Perhaps slightly less expected, though, was Donny’s call for conservatives to go after educators like a bunch of angry, monosyllabic frat boys.

Warming up the crowd for his father’s usual string of lies and bullshit, Junior told the group, “You know what I love? I love seeing some young conservatives.” Sounding like the belligerent drunk guy at the bar, the sentient Natty Lite keg continued: “Because I know it’s not easy. Keep up that fight. Bring it to your schools. You don’t have to be indoctrinated by these loser teachers that are trying to sell you on socialism from birth. You don’t have to do it.” https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/02/donald-trump-jr-teachers